Unsolved

by James Patterson

  “Of medical certainty. Yes, I understand.”

  “It’s certainly within the realm of possibility that his death was wrongfully­—”

  “Right, there’s always some possibility of homicide,” he says, interrupting her again. “But that’s not what happened here.” Dwight nods at Elizabeth, who’s sitting next to him. “Okay, Agent, thank you for the good work.”

  The screen goes dark, and Dwight pushes himself up from his chair. “It’s a dead end,” he says.

  “It was worth a look,” says Elizabeth. “This man was the only—”

  “It was worth a look,” says Dwight, “and now it’s a dead end.”

  “Just because she can’t prove it in court doesn’t mean it isn’t worth investigating,” I say. “Not every lead is provable in court. It’s still a lead.”

  Dwight removes his glasses and rubs his eyes. “‘Not every lead is provable in court.’ Thank you, Dockery, for that insightful wisdom.”

  “He could have smothered Mayday without leaving signs of struggle. If he Tasered him—”

  “If he Tasered him! Yes! Leaving marks that don’t look anything like a Taser’s! So Citizen David isn’t just some crusader for the poor and downtrodden—he’s also a diabolical serial killer who can fool the Bureau’s top forensic pathologist!”

  “Sir—”

  “Look, Dockery, we all know you helped catch Graham.” He waves his hands theatrically. “We all know—believe me, we know; God, do we know—that you helped bring down a brilliant serial killer. Okay? But quit looking for lightning to strike twice. Quit making this about you. You had your moment in the sun, and it’s over now.”

  With blood rushing to my face and anger welling up inside me, I struggle to find words to answer him. Keep it together, I tell myself. Don’t be the “hysterical woman” he wants you to be.

  “This wasn’t the work of some evil, sociopathic genius, Dockery. Citizen David is a crusader. He goes after corporations and government entities when he thinks they’re unfair to the poor. He doesn’t sit at home and build custom-made Tasers and devise diabolical schemes to murder the very people he’s trying to protect.”

  I clear my throat and place my hands in front of me, forcing them not to ball into fists. “Sir, I’m only saying—”

  “This man had a lung disease, for Christ’s sake. A homeless man who—I’m going to take a wild guess—didn’t lead the healthiest of lives on his best day, who had a chronic pulmonary disease that he didn’t get treatment for, probably didn’t even know about, but we should focus on his ‘murder’”—he puts air quotes around the word—“because he had traces of plastic on his tongue, which even Agent Janus said could come from simply unwrapping a sandwich and eating it. Yes, let’s drop everything else we’re doing and spend all our resources on that lottery ticket.”

  “I’m not suggesting that we drop—”

  “Or,” Dwight says, yet again cutting off a woman, this time raising his index finger as if a thought had suddenly occurred to him, “we could leave the work of agents to agents. You wanna be one, go to Quantico. Until then, stick to your patterns and algorithms.”

  “Mr. Director,” says Elizabeth.

  “No.” He slices a hand through the air as he turns to Elizabeth. “She got her follow-up. She got her autopsy. I didn’t stop it, did I? And it came back inconclusive, at best—at best. Nobody thinks this homeless man was murdered. However,” he says, turning back to me, “if memory serves, a few blocks away from where that man died, two hundred homeless people absolutely, unquestionably were murdered in the bombing of a building.”

  “That’s what I’m—”

  “Focus. On. That.” He punches a finger at me with each word. “No more about this—May-whatever. Mayday? Enough of him. Enough!”

  I drop my head but don’t say anything.

  “I warned you that this was your last chance,” he says. “I catch you one more time going on some self-promoting witch hunt instead of following the real clues, and you’re done, Dockery. You get me? Done.”

  I close my eyes as I hear the door to the conference room open and then slam shut.

  70

  I RETURN to my cubicle, suddenly feeling the weight of sleepless nights, the roller-coaster ride of momentum and setback, in my neck and shoulders, in my rubbery legs.

  I’m on my own, as usual. No support from the Bureau. Just me and my gang of analysts.

  Well, so be it, I tell myself. We’ve done it before. We’ll do it again.

  “How did it go?” Rabbit asks me.

  “Great, wonderful, peachy.” I throw down a file on my desk. “Dwight said that he admired my tenacity, that I’ve earned his respect and trust, and that no matter what Dr. Janus says, I should continue to follow any leads that I deem worth pursuing. He’s also giving us all bonuses for our good work.”

  Pully’s head pops up above his cubicle. “You need cheering up?”

  I snap out of my funk, remembering what Pully promised—that by day’s end, he’d get a clear visual of that decal on the arm of Darwin’s wheelchair.

  “I definitely need cheering up,” I say.

  “Then let me e-mail you something.”

  I sit down at my desk and wait for the e-mail. “You got a clear image of that sticker for me, Pully?”

  “Pretty clear. Not in color, of course,” he says. “But you won’t need color.”

  The e-mail pops into my in-box.

  The subject line: Pully is a genius (but we already knew that)

  I open it. It’s a screenshot from the video after Pully used whatever image-enhancement tools he had at his disposal.

  A close-up of the arm of the wheelchair, mostly obscured by Darwin’s forearm, which makes it hard to see too much of the sticker. But the good news is that the sticker wraps around the side of the armrest, clear enough to see.

  In the left-hand corner of the sticker are stars. Beneath them, horizontal lines, uniformly spaced.

  Stripes.

  Unmistakable, even in black-and-white rather than red, white, and blue.

  “You are a genius, Pully.”

  “But the bigger point is, we already knew that.”

  I pop up to my feet. “Team meeting!” I call out, which means we all stand and look at one another over our cubicle dividers. “We have another data point. Let’s review what we know.”

  “Number one, he has some kind of a moon-like tattoo or scar on his face,” says Rabbit.

  “If we can believe a homeless person’s account of what another homeless person said to him,” I say. Rabbit makes a face, but I shrug. “I’m thinking like an agent. Like a prosecutor who’s going to have to ask a judge for a warrant.”

  “Okay, I get it.” Rabbit nods. “We have a wheelchair,” she says, ticking off point number two. “And now, thanks to our resident genius Pully, we have a wheelchair with a sticker of the American flag on the armrest.”

  “If,” I reply, “we can believe that the man who put something under Nora Connolley’s car in that parking lot is our killer. Which we don’t know. Or we can’t confirm, anyway.”

  Rabbit deflates. “I don’t like it when you think like an agent.”

  “But they’ll shut us down if we don’t have more. The key is the wheelchair,” I say. “That’s a huge lead. He has a car, a van, a vehicle of some kind, right? He must.”

  “So we start with disability license plates,” Pully chimes in. “What’s our range?”

  “We think he’s local to Vienna, Virginia, right?” I say. “A day’s trip away, no more?”

  “Right,” says Rabbit.

  “So let’s do a multistate search. An eight-, maybe ten-hour radius. That’s gotta be—what—DC, Virginia, Maryland, West Virginia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania…let’s add Tennessee and Kentucky. Start there.”

  “Got it.”

  “I want DMVs,” I say. “All disability license plates in those states. The driver’s-license photos too. Then cross-reference with CCTV tollway
footage in Chicago near the time of the bombing. And in New Orleans around the dates of Nora Connolley’s murder.”

  “Men only?” asks Pully. “A certain age?”

  “Everyone,” I say. I’m not putting anything past Darwin. He’s almost certainly on the younger side—somewhere between twenty and fifty-something—but who knows? And he’s almost certainly a man, but can we completely dismiss the possibility that Darwin is a woman posing as a man? I’m not dismissing anything with Darwin.

  “Okay,” says Rabbit. “It will take some time.”

  I know. But this is Rabbit’s specialty. Nobody is better at taking raw data and collating it into a usable format. It’s the backbone of our operation. Books once used a basketball analogy to describe Rabbit: she doesn’t get the score, but she gets the assist.

  “Do your magic, Rabbit,” I say. “And do it fast.”

  71

  CLOSING TIME. Only one customer is lingering in the store along with Books. Books hardly pays any attention to the customer, telling himself that he’s giving the man some space—some customers don’t want to be followed around and hassled; they want to browse in peace—but the truth is that Books is so captivated by his work searching for Citizen David’s accomplice within the Bureau that he hasn’t paid much attention to any of the goings-on in his store today.

  He finished looking at the financial records of the field agents assigned to the Citizen David task force earlier this afternoon, flagging a couple of items for follow-up but not seeing anything that set off an internal alarm, nothing suggesting the receipt of large amounts of cash, no suspicious website traffic.

  Next, the analysts Bonita Sexton and Eric Pullman. Nothing there, unsurprisingly. Pully spends almost no cash, using his debit or credit cards for everything, though “everything” in his case is the innocuous stuff of today’s mid-twenties computer geek—video games, computer software, techno-savvy items. Rabbit continues to live her bohemian existence, spending more than Pully but nothing extravagant, most of it going to health-food stores and charities and yoga classes.

  The field agents—done. The analysts—done. And he has almost nothing to show for it. The only people left are at the top of the food chain—the heads of the divisions. And the people above them.

  That’s what has occupied him for the past ninety minutes. He started with the basics—bank statements, a list of expenditures and receipts.

  And something is wrong.

  He checks and rechecks them. He goes back six months. Nine months. Maybe he’s misreading them. So he pulls some records from one of the field agents who uses the same bank. No, he’s not reading these statements incorrectly. The account holder’s ATM transactions are located in a particular spot at the top of each month’s statement.

  He’s reading them correctly. And there’s something wrong.

  There’s something missing.

  “Do it again,” he tells himself. “Be sure.”

  He flips through the statements again, going back a full year. Checking the spot on the statements for ATM transactions. Looking at the few checks she’s written. Scouring her credit card transactions.

  “Wow,” he says.

  Rewind to a year ago. Then she was transacting in a normal way. Took out cash at an ATM every few weeks, usually two hundred dollars a pop, sometimes more, sometimes less. Used her credit card at Starbucks in the morning, at someplace near the office for lunch, at the supermarket for groceries, at Target for clothes or other items. She bought gas for her car. Purchased clothes and shoes at standard places like Neiman Marcus and Nordstrom and at some local boutiques—she does dress quite nicely, he’s noticed.

  But nine months ago, that changed. She still used her credit card, on autopay, for some bigger-ticket items like car and insurance payments, her mortgage, a club membership. Multiple expensive dinners and several hotel stays are on there too. But groceries? Coffee? Lunch? Gas? Dry-cleaning? Even clothes? Nope. Not a single debit or credit card transaction.

  She’s been buying all those things with cash.

  Yet she hasn’t made a single cash withdrawal from an ATM or bank branch in the past nine months.

  So where is Elizabeth Ashland getting all that cash?

  “Didn’t find what I was looking for,” says the customer, giving Books a perfunctory wave.

  Books looks up at him, nods, and smiles, and the customer leaves the store. “I think I just did,” he whispers to himself.

  72

  THE NEXT morning, weary from staying at the office past midnight, I enter the Hoover Building holding Dwight’s cup of coffee. We are so close now. This is no time to piss him off.

  I smirk at Roberta and knock on Dwight’s office door as I enter. He’s on his landline and raises a hand to me. Then he covers the phone and says, “Emmy, that’s not necessary.”

  I sigh and play my part, keeping my voice up. “I just wanted to show my appreciation—”

  “No. Hang on. Let me put you on hold,” he says into the receiver and he hits a button. Then he directs a stare at me. “For real. Stop bringing me coffee. Just don’t do it anymore. Stop.”

  He hits the button again and resumes his phone call, leaving me wondering what in the heck just happened. I walk out of the office, shrugging at the question on Roberta’s face, and go down the hallway.

  I pass Elizabeth Ashland’s office and then stop. Normally, I speed up as I go by her office, wanting to limit contact as much as possible. But she did stick up for me yesterday—a little bit, at least—when I was pressing my theory about Mayday’s death.

  And she was in Dwight’s office yesterday morning when I delivered his coffee, and she’d looked quite puzzled by what I was doing.

  She is at her desk, reading something on her computer screen and glancing down at something on her notepad. As usual, she’s immaculate—sharp navy suit, hair pulled back in a perfect chignon, beautifully manicured nails with pale pink polish. That must be tiring, I imagine, always getting everything just so. And how many gorgeous suits does one person need?

  When I knock on the open door, she looks up. “Dockery,” she says. “I was just reading the social media summaries on Citizen David. Looks like he’s no longer the golden child.”

  It’s true. David has taken a big fall since Chicago. He’s repeatedly denied any involvement in the bombing, via his middle-of-the-night, untraceable posts on Twitter and Facebook, but the public has largely turned against him. Social media comments about him are mostly negative now. Editorial boards that once gently scolded him for his victimless crimes now denounce him for killing two hundred people in Chicago or for spawning a copycat who did.

  She sizes me up, her eyes focusing on the coffee in my hand.

  “That’s not for Assistant Director Ross, I hope,” she says.

  “Well, it was…”

  “No, no, you’re not doing that anymore. That’s ridiculous. You’re not his errand girl.”

  So she is the reason the morning coffee delivery is coming to an end. She said something to Dwight. He outranks her, but somehow, she made him stop.

  “Thanks,” I say, not sure how else to respond.

  She waves me off. “Just keep doing your work, Emmy. You’re doing a good job. More than good. And he knows that. That’s the problem, actually. Sometimes, the men around here—well.” She thinks a moment, then shakes her head. “Anyway, keep doing good work. You’ll be fine.”

  I wish that were true, that good work was all it took around here.

  “You still think Mayday was murdered,” she says.

  I’m about to speak, but a big caution flag is waving in front of me. Once I start, there’s no stopping. The only way I can explain why I think Mayday was murdered is to point out the similarities between his murder and all of Darwin’s other victims. Which means I would have to tell her about Darwin too.

  And though she’s scoring points with me now, I can’t trust her to be a full-fledged ally. She could run right to Dwight Ross with it, and I’d be shu
t down.

  Not now, I think. Identify Darwin first. Find him. Then you can tell her.

  “I can’t argue with a forensic pathologist,” I say. “Dr. Janus doesn’t think he was murdered. Who am I to say otherwise?”

  Her eyebrows move, a brief wrinkle in her forehead. “That doesn’t sound like you,” she says. “Giving up so easily.” Her eyes narrow, like she’s trying to read between the lines. Like she’s trying to read me.

  “You don’t want to tell me,” she says. “You don’t trust me.”

  “No, that’s not—”

  “No, it’s all right.” She sits back in her chair, throws her pen onto the desk. “If I were you, I probably wouldn’t trust me either. We haven’t exactly made it easy on you, have we?”

  There’s no point in my responding to that.

  “You still don’t think Citizen David is responsible for the bombing in Chicago, do you?”

  I shrug, trying to be noncommittal.

  “Off the record,” she says. “I hereby grant you immunity for any answer you give.” She waves an imaginary wand.

  “Immunity from whom?” I ask. “From Assistant Director Ross?”

  She leans forward, puts her hands together. “Emmy, I want a result here. I want a solve. Your track record earns you the benefit of the doubt. And I think there’s a reason you don’t think Citizen David did Chicago. There’s a reason you think Mayday was murdered. You won’t tell us why. You won’t tell us because you’re afraid you’ll be accused of going off on some wild—well, basically, what Dwight accused you of yesterday. You’re afraid Dwight will fire you.”

  She couldn’t have said it better. I didn’t give Elizabeth enough credit.

  “Tell me,” she says. “Me. Not Dwight. If it doesn’t make any sense, I’ll tell you. You know I will.” She chuckles. “And if that happens, it will stay between us.”

  I’m still not sure how to respond to this sudden thaw in our relationship. Can I believe Elizabeth Ashland?

  “If what you’re thinking sounds credible, like something we should be pursuing,” she says, “then let’s pursue it.” She opens her hands. “So let’s hear it.”